Rebecca Trescher

Rebecca Trescher was born in Tübingen in 1986. She lives and works as a freelance composer, clarinetist, and bandleader in Nuremberg and Berlin. Driven by boundless curiosity and the joy of experimenting with both jazz and symphonic contemporary music, she has acquired an outstanding reputation in the German and international jazz scene. Her compositional ideas are closely related to nature: her music is both grounded and ethereal. Her role models include musicians as varied as Björk, Bob Brookmeyer, Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Radiohead, Maurice Ravel, Wayne Shorter, Igor Stravinsky, and Questlove. In her compositions, Trescher creates a unique sound world that is associative and organic rather than provocative. Critics and audiences alike have been fascinated by her ability to use only a few notes to transform a serene musical atmosphere into poetic arcs of tension at a symphonic scale.  

Rebecca Trescher grew up in a family with four siblings. She discovered her passion for the clarinet as a child. To pay for classical music lessons and later her university studies, she soon began to take temporary jobs. In addition to the clarinet, she also learned to play flute, guitar, and electric bass. She was fascinated by improvisation at a very early age and began to develop melodies on the clarinet and bass. She studied jazz clarinet and composition at the Hochschule for Music in Nuremberg from 2008 to 2015, receiving both a Diploma and a Master of Music degree. She also earned a further Master’s Degree in composition from the Hochschule for Music and Theater in Munich. 

Rebecca Trescher is a frequent guest at prominent festivals. Her concerts are regularly recorded and streamed by the Bavarian Radio and Arte. On international concert stages, she performs most frequently with the Rebecca Trescher Tentet and the Rebecca Trescher Quartet, but also as a soloist and as a duo with the Greek guitarist Giorgos Tabakis. She has received numerous prizes and scholarships, including a stipendium from the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg in 2014, the city of Nuremberg’s Kulturförderpreis in 2015, an Artist in Residency position at Künstlerhaus Lukas in Ahrenshoop, the Bavarian Kunstförderpreis in 2017, the Wolfram von Eschenbach Prize in 2021, and the German Jazz Prize for “Composition of the Year 2022”. In that same year, she won DownBeat magazine’s international critics’ poll as “Rising Star Clarinet”. 

Ten years ago, Trescher’s enthusiasm for large ensembles and unusual instrumental combinations led her to found her own ensemble with which she could experiment musically: Ensemble 11. Her conscious exclusion of brass instruments made it possible to create a gentle symphonic and impressionistic sound that retained a chamber music character in spite of the relatively large number of voices. In 2019, however, she found herself imagining different sound colors without classical flute and voice. The result was the Rebecca Trescher Tentet, which won the New German Jazz Prize in 2022. With a unique and multi-faceted instrumentation employing several saxophones, clarinet, cello, concert harp, vibraphone, trumpet, bass, and percussion, the group is able to embark on the unconventional and moving acoustical journeys in Rebecca Trescher’s compositions. Since the founding of the Tentet, Trescher has always worked with the same sound engineer, who is himself a musician and producer and travels to all the band’s concerts to supervise the live sound mix. 

Rebecca Trescher has composed a number of commissioned works, including a 120-minute concert piece for the city of Nuremberg to accompany Sergei Eisenstein’s epic silent film, October. As Artist in Residence at the Tafelhalle in Nuremberg since 2017, Trescher organizes an interdisciplinary concert series to which she invites guest artists from the fields of dance, literature, video performance, and music. She has been head of the jury for the Leipzig Young People’s Jazz Prize and is a member of the evaluation committee of the Bavarian Kunstförderpreis in the fields of music and dance. She has taught young people since 2008 and since 2022 has been a university instructor for jazz ensemble direction, combo, and improvisation at the Hochschule for Music in Nuremberg.

Rebecca Trescher is not simply a multi-talent; she is also a keen observer. The impetus for her compositions often comes from her impressions of the changing aspects of nature during long walks in the woods. But during her year as Artist in Residence at the Cité internationales des Arts in Paris in 2019/2020, the streets of Paris were the stimulus for her prize-winning four-part “Paris Zyklus | The Spirit of the Streets”. (Her Tentet’s recording of the work was released by Enja in 2022.) Rebecca Trescher has also recorded seven albums under her own name. 

In 2024, Trescher will perform with her Tentet at numerous venues including Jazzahead in Bremen and the Bonn Opera House. Her eighth recording, “Character Pieces”, will be released in May 2024 by Enja. Trescher is currently working on a new composition for a production at Deutschlandfunk in Cologne in September 2024.